In the shadow of Covid, New Yorkers are discovering new anxieties
In times like these, you take your consolations where you can find them, and in New York, where Covid infection rates are lower than they were and anxiety and depression levels high, there is something to be said for the diversification of bad news. Many years ago, a BBC newsreader launched an informal and much-mocked campaign to make the news more uplifting. It was the wrong approach, in my view. When things are bad, it can be useful to remind oneself not only that they could be worse, but that they could be worse in the conventional, nightmarish ways.
This is a psychological trick, not to be confused with the rationalisations of the anti-mask and reopen-at-all-costs lobby, who seem to be operating on the basis of “hey-ho, we all have to die sometime”. (These people, who are never from vulnerable groups themselves, put me in mind of those 19thcentury generals overseeing the slaughter of battle from many miles’ distance.) Instead, I mean the oddly soothing phenomenon of being reminded that, in ways entirely unrelated to Covid-19, the world continues to be a baffling and violently unpredictable place.
This has become increasingly apparent in New York, where, as the immediate threat of the virus has diminished, the news focus has returned to other dangers. There is appetite, once again, for the freak accident and scaremongering about crime, those tabloid staples which serve, in less turbulent times, as a repository for one’s generalised anxiety and function in that capacity as efficiently as ghost stories.
It’s summer, so it’s sharks. There is a great white off the coast of Maine, which attacked and killed a woman at the end of July, causing a local theatre to cancel its outdoor screening of Jaws and everyone else to shudder and feel momentarily lucky. Bull sharks have been spotted off the coast of Long Island, meanwhile, and for a second last week, discussions around the threat of school closures and infection rates were replaced with the more urgent – and pleasurable – task of parsing the hunting techniques of a more remote threat. (As a woman in the bank told me with complete authority, they swim so close to shore, you really can’t risk going in deeper than knee-height.)
Crime in the city is real, of course, and statistically you are more likely to be a victim of it than to be killed by a shark. But to read the tabloids, with headlines screaming that robberies are up in some neighbourhoods by 286%, with “armed gunmen holding up residents just feet from the homes of billionaires”, you would think the city was about to slide into anarchy – such a bogus and reliable drama that it signals a return to normality. (If the statistics look shocking, of course, it’s because crime rates in the city are so low that any increase is proportionately a huge margin.) Meanwhile, the company Revel, a ride-share scheme using electric mopeds, paused its operations last week after two people died and several more were injured, following reports of users riding without helmets and riding on sidewalks (which led to Revel suspending more than 1,000 riders in June).
There are tragedies in all of these stories. But they are finite, contained, easily categorisable by the rest of us as instances of vast bad luck. In the case of both sharks and mopeds, the prelude to almost every discussion I’ve heard runs along the lines of: can you imagine? Surviving the virus, and the world in its current deplorable state, only to be eaten by a shark? It returns death to being an outlandish event, avoidable by not hiring a moped or going into the sea, as opposed to something that waits for us in the air of the subway. At the height of the virus’s spread in New York, the zip code with the highest death rate – a neighbourhood of Brooklyn – saw a fatality rate of one in 165 residents.
These are mild consolations, part of a reporting convention designed to thrill us with the promise of extinction via meteor activity, “murder hornets” and sinkholes, and all of which, through force of sheer improbability, act as a relief from more tangible risks. At the beginning of the pandemic, when the news was exclusively and relentlessly devoted to the death rate in New York, I became briefly addicted to horror and zombie shows. It’s a turn of some kind that, for a second, between the first wave and dire predictions of what might happen in September, the need for the zombie apocalypse can be briefly retired.
When the news was devoted to the death rate in New York, I became briefly addicted to horror and zombie shows